Where the Yellow Line Ends…

Now we go where the yellow line ends from cars (with people inside) driving on it. Where the yellow line, worn down, disappears, fades away, diminishes in rubble, begins the end of the road where humans stopped paving it. Instead, it becomes the dusty trail with the houses without roofs falling and crumbling around it, with green land spreading for miles beside it. This is the place where buildings are not built in apartmental layers, but swell with life inside them and overflow with life outside of them. I have become part of that swollen life of shared private spaces.

Sometimes where the yellow line ends there aren’t even cars or people. Other times there are, lost in the dust. But this is what we do and don’t find on the unpaved road: turns turning, bends bending, people peopling–doing as people do along the road. They come and they go. I am out to follow some of them, walk beside some of them, lead some of them, and sometimes to people on my own. 

For now I enjoy the ride. Live. Love the countryside, its breaking-down houses with rusting tin roofs and fading, flaking paint and holes where the concrete was as if war wore it down, but really it all has to do with how it was built. Throughout our youth, we draw simplistic pictures of houses with triangular roofs, square windows, and rectangular doors so that when we are older we know what a prototypical house looks like and understand how to build one. But over time, it can become a breaking down home. With families and stories inside it that we don’t know how to reconstruct because well-built families don’t come with an instruction manual. 

Here, there are holes in weathered doors, gates to backyards that lead to nowhere, and metal wire reaching upward from cement rooftops toward heaven asking God to build the second story. And they remain, the wires, always optimistic. The houses with tin roofs don’t have upward-reaching wires; there’s no hope for a second story. They won’t build upon what was made, only construct a community of people within their existing walls and watch them as they crumble slightly and break down under the humidity and humility of communal respiration and from the rain that leaks in through the space between the cement walls and the tin roofs that no one could fix.

But this is out there, not in the center of the city where the yellow line runs. Where 15 apartment rooms are stacked on top of each other with one person living inside each. And the top story has a terrace over it instead of a cement roof with sticking-up metal wires or a single sheet of tin.